Guest Bloggers

I’m delighted to introduce a new line-up of guest bloggers for On the Ground. Originally, I brought in guest bloggers only for the period when I was on book leave in the fall, but it worked so well that I thought I’d continue it even when I’m contributing to the blog as well. So here’s the line-up for the next six months or so:

— Will Okun will continue with his words and photos from the educational front lines of Chicago, where he’s an English teacher. Will accompanied me on my win-a-trip journey to Africa last summer, blogging as he went, and his essays from his school have been for most of us another kind of foreign correspondence.

— Josh Ruxin is also continuing from the fall line-up. Josh is a public health and development expert from Columbia University who is working in Rwanda. His responsibilities include running a millennium village in Rwanda and fighting neglected tropical diseases.

— Nicki Bennett is an American aid worker who bounces around from one hot spot to the next, working for Oxfam. I met her in Sudan, ran into her again in Congo, and at the moment she’s in Bangladesh working on post-hurricane reconstruction.

— Ruth Kennedy is a British midwife with long experience on the grimmest front lines of maternal health. She worked for years in Chad, then I met her during her years at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia, and she has just moved up to a tiny outpost of Baptist Mid-Missions in a remote area of northern Ethiopia.

If you have specific questions for any of these folks, please post them below.

I’d also like to thank the people who were guest blogging for me during my book leave: Anne-Marie Slaughter, Joe Stiglitz, Kurt Campbell and Steve Radelet. They are a brilliant group, and it was a privilege to have their posts on this site.